Mimi's Ghost (37 page)

Or could it be the police? Or the carabinieri? Forbes perhaps, knowing what Morris, if only by elimination, now knew he knew - for it had been he who had taken the letters of course - had phoned the police. They had come immediately.

Again the buzzer sounded. Morris was frantic. His head was splitting. He might vomit at any moment. It even occurred to him he might just lie down with them both on the bed and die, after all the humiliation he had been through. There it came again, for God's sake! Except this time the noise was followed by a distant voice screaming:
‘Sporco negro,
we know you're in there. Come out and look what's happened to your fancy car.'

Morris breathed, if the word can be used of someone in a gas-filled room. Of course! It was just Mimi's way of reminding him! Running back into the kitchen, arm over his mouth, he grabbed a felt-tip, came back to the sitting-room and began to write in crazy block caps on the whitewashed walls: death to THE DIRTY NEGROES.
VIVA
THE NORTHERN LEAGUE.
VENETO PER I VENETI.

No more than a minute later he was stumbling down the stairs, gasping for clean air. At the main door to the palazzo he stopped and listened. Sure enough there was the sound of some motor bike or other accelerating away into the distance. Presumably they had knifed the tyres of the Mercedes, or tossed brake fluid over the bonnet, which, though annoying in one sense, could hardly be more convenient in another. In any event, he wouldn't be stopping to look.

Morris had already stepped out onto the front path when he remembered the keys. Oh, but this was so amateur! So hopelessly careless! Did he still have his own? Yes. He rushed back up the stairs, hearing the sudden explosion of a vacuum cleaner behind a door on the first floor. Certainly the builder had cheated shamelessly on the insulation. He deserved a scandal like this to lower his prices. Before inserting his key, without quite knowing why, he untucked his shirt and stuffed it in his mouth.

Inside the air was sickly now. Where would her keys be? There must be some explanation for that writing on the walls, for how the murderous racists had got in, how they had opened the gas jets. And if he smashed a window the precious poison would escape. No, it must seem as if she had left her keys in the door, a carelessness not beyond her.

In her handbag? He couldn't remember feeling them there.

And how long was he going to last in here without throwing up? Morris dashed up the spiral staircase and straight through to the bathroom, where he pulled the shirt from his mouth
_'
opened the window a moment and breathed deeply. Only to find, directly opposite him on scaffolding that had risen with obscene rapidity, a worker sitting on a plank, drinking from a wine bottle and presumably looking straight at him. This was simply unfair. He got the window closed, went back into the main room and began to root through her clothes in a heap in the corner. Suspender belts, no less. Obviously she'd brought all the gear. Wet with drool too. But there was no time for this indulgence. Her jacket, they must be In her jacket.

Still holding his breath he found the thing over the back of a chair and pulled out the keys. Good. But, as so often, curiosity got the better of him. Instead of rushing back downstairs he returned to the bedroom and the two naked bodies on the big modern bed with the Armani-upholstered oval backboard she had paid so much for. Even now, he thought, even now he could turn back. They weren't dead yet, were they? He bent down and kissed his wife's pale cheek just beside the ear, then crouched and kissed a rubbery nipple, so shy and vulnerable in sleep. The paps that would never suckle Morris's child.

No more than a minute later, mustering all his sang-froid and city man's invisibility, Morris left the palazzina. Looking neither to right nor left, he walked to the tiny Seicento, and climbed In. Thanks be to God and His guiding and guarding hand, the ancient piece of junk started first time. Morris smiled.
Fiat justitia,
as Forbes would say.

‘0h,
ecco,
‘ere you are, Mr Morrees!' Dionisio pushed the drug trolley into the ward. It was almost five o'clock. Morris had not gone to seek him out. That would be too obvious. Anyway, there had been Forbes to attend to first. A confession to wring from him. Strict orders to give, backed up by threats. And promises. The matchbox and assorted detritus were in his jacket pocket in his locker. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, was the motto there.

‘It is some hours I am looking for you.'

‘I thought your shift was over,' Morris said politely, raising his eyes from his Bible. He had been marvelling at the work that must have gone into cross-referencing his Authorised Version, a labour that had so far allowed him to track down thirteen uses of the word ‘vengeance', and notably: Tor he put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salvation upon his head, and he put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal as a cloke.'

Morris particularly liked ‘an helmet' and the spelling of ‘cloke', though he feared there would be vivid dreams to come. Beneath an enforced calm and interest in curious detail, his mind was still reeling from the degradations he had been forced to submit to. One clung on to Mimi, to one's religion, one's God, as to identity itself.

‘You are not ‘ere for lunch.'

He had gone down into the garden, Morris said, and fallen asleep on a bench. He thought it must be the relief of finally having the dressings off and his face fixed (here he smiled falsely). He was feeling good. I'll be able to leave the day after tomorrow, won't I?'

‘If the doctor is agreed there is no infection,' Dionisio sai.

The ward was quite busy at this hour, with worried relatives coming to inspect the kind of monstrosities they would have to learn to put up with over the years to come, and pretend were nothing. The nurse was about to move on with his bountiful selection of tranquillisers. But Morris asked: ‘Are you a Christian, Dionisio?'

‘A
cattolico,'
the nurse said, showing no surprise.

‘I was just reading this passage, and I was wondering,' Morris asked, ‘do you think that the Lord wreaks vengeance on those who do evil? I mean it's an old-fashioned concept. But the Bible does say it.'

' “Wreaks”?' Dionisio was puzzled. ‘I thought this means the bad smells.'

‘No, takes vengeance,' Morris said patiently. ‘Vengeance, vendetta. Do you think God would do that kind of thing?'

The nurse's gnomish southern features were endearingly concentrated. At least Morris had got him off the subject of his five-hour absence. Quite probably one thing simply superimposed itself over another in that tiny brain. ‘When I first arrive at Earrrls Court,' Dionisio said at last, ‘we ‘ave the landlord that asks too much, but too much money and ‘e never mends the toilet flush and never the heating works properly. Then ‘e say he will throw us away because we are too many in the flat.'

‘No sense of charity,' Morris agreed, thinking how many feckless foreigners he had given a roof to in Villa Caritas.

Dionisio was stumbling on with his story. ‘One of the boys with us ‘e is very religious and ‘e pray that something will make that the landlord change ‘is idea.'

Morris waited, mildly bored.

‘Well' - Dionisio paused for effect - ‘the same day after ‘e say we ‘ave to go ‘e is knocked by the bus.'

‘Really?' The coincidence was so interesting it actually took Morris's mind off things for a moment. ‘And died?' he asked eagerly.

‘No,' Dionisio said. ‘But he can't walk. For a long time.'

‘Ah, so you mean he relented and let you stay in the flat?'

‘No,' Dionisio shook his head very seriously. ‘No, ‘e threw us away anyway. What you want? In England there is not enough protection for the foreigner in these situations. But we find a place in ‘Ammersmith that is nicer.'

‘Oh, yes, that was lucky.' It did seem to Morris that there was a lack of biblical clarity in this story. He much preferred Sodom and Gomorrah. But he let it pass. ‘By the way, I really want to leave tomorrow morning,' he announced. ‘Is there any way . . . I feel I should get out and face the world.'

The
primario
visits at nine o'clock,' Dionisio said. ‘And he will say if the skeen is ready.'

A couple of hours later, Antonella was sitting on the side of Morris's bed, sobbing. She had been trying to talk to Paola all day and hadn't been able to find her. She'd gone to the company, but there was nobody in the office. Anyway the moment she'd walked in she'd had to walk out again, thinking what Bobo had quite probably done there. It was awful, with the police looking at the letters and asking her all kinds of personal details, and with a list of phone numbers called from the house and whose they were and why and who could this woman be. She felt so upset and she just wanted all this to be over. Over. She didn't even care how it finished now, well or badly. The day the trial of these immigrants was over and they had caught this horrible person trying to extort a ransom, she would just get on a plane and fly away, she didn't care where. Or she would go to a convent or something. She'd always wanted to go to a convent when she was a girl. She wished she had done now. But then she had wanted a baby so much and she had loved Bobo so much. Only now she would never, never have a baby, and never love anybody ever again because of the way Bobo had treated her, the horrible things that had happened. She was living in hell.

Propped up on his pillows, Morris thought what a precious and beautiful woman she was, so rich in sincere emotion. Paola could never have cried like this. It wouldn't even have bothered Paola if he had been having an affair with somebody. Probably she would have been quite pleased. Without thinking he reached out across the bed and caressed her hair.

‘Don't say never,' Morris said softly. ‘Never is a long time. You're such a lovely woman, Tonia.'

His sister-in-law rubbed her knuckles all the more fiercely into her eyes. Her whole body trembled.

‘And don't go away,' Morris whispered. ‘Because I need you. Who's going to help me run things if you go away? Paola never helps. I've been trying to phone her all day, but she's never there. And I have all kinds of projects you could join in with, giving a hand to these poor
extra-cotnunitari,
I'd like to open a proper centre for them, you know. Not just make them slaves.'

His fingers were stroking her hair very lightly. Then, as she still hid her face in her hands, though her body had stopped trembling now, he rather injudiciously said: ‘I think I'm in love with you, Tonia. I've been in love with you a long time. You remind me so much of Massimina.'

She turned and looked sharply at him, her red eyes straining to focus. ‘Morrees.' She shook her head, features brimming with confusion.
‘Morrees, set cost straw'
she whispered. ‘So very strange sometimes.'

So that made her the third of three sisters to have said those exact same words. Morris nearly passed out. ‘Let's read the Scriptures together,' he muttered.

He had already woken towards three and was vomiting copiously when the police arrived. In his dream they had been filling his mouth with filth and dead flesh: Paola, Kwame, Bobo, Forbes. He had been struggling, fighting, calling for Mimi, calling on God. Then suddenly he sat up sharply and ejected it all in a stream of vomit: the worms and wormwood, gall and dung, even bones. He was screaming for a priest. Then the ward was flooded with a light so brilliant that he imagined a vision, a splendid apparition of Mimi, or of Christ. His mind reeled after sight and focus, his stomach still retching, his skin shivering with cold and sweat. And as he raised his eyes it was to find, more nightmarish than his nightmare, the angular Fendtsteig approaching across the room, a nurse on one side, a carabiniere on the other. They had got him at last.

The nurse broke into a run, found cloths and cleaning equipment. Morris continued to retch and was helped from his bed. ‘I had a dream,' he gasped between convulsions. ‘My face. They were carving up my face.' A junior doctor had arrived and was kindly explaining that this could well be a delayed reaction to the prolonged anaesthesia of the operation. Morris was helped into a dressing-gown and led off to a consulting room. Fendtsteig came with them, waiting, watching, though actually it was taking Morris some considerable effort to keep retching now. Finally, when he had calmed down and sipped a little water, he turned to the carabiniere with a wan smile. ‘Can I help?'

Fendtsteig leaned over to the doctor and there was a muttered exchange. The doctor shrugged his shoulders. ‘How do you feel,' he asked.

‘A bit weak,' Morris admitted. ‘But if the colonnello has some questions, I suppose . . .'

Then they sat him on the examining bed and broke the news. Quite brutally, Morris thought. Not the way he would have done it at all. Just told him straight. Wife dead. In arms of black lover. Gas. Racism. Not a scrap of sensibility. Allowing Morris to respond with the appropriate incredulity, head shaking, staring eyes. Then a barrage of questions, of disbelieving questions - when, where, why, who, how had they got in? -until suddenly he buried his ruined face in his hands, swaying gently from side to side. He waited perhaps a minute. Finally in a low voice he said: ‘I'm exhausted, it's too much. It's too much. Why does everything have to happen to me? Why do people die all around me?' He shook his head. No, he couldn't identify the body now. He just couldn't. He wouldn't. He refused! And he begged for tranquillisers and to be allowed to go to sleep. He stood up to go, stumbled, but at the same time saw in the mirror above the washbasin that Fendtsteig's eyes following him to the door were cold and curious. The man was inhuman!

Turning abruptly, Morris screamed: ‘Now that you've seen what kind of woman my wife was, maybe you'll understand why I was spending my evenings moping over my dead girlfriend's grave! But your sort never believe people until the truth Is rammed In your face. The next thing you know I'll have to hear that I killed my own wife. And mother and first love and colleagues and everybody who's ever died in the vicinity.'